A Talk with Macworld

Macworld's Jason Snell on Apple's Fervor for Great Products

- 2007.08.21

Bong! . . . :-) . . . Welcome to Macintosh!

When the Macintosh was
released in 1984, it quickly developed a following by consumers and
professionals alike. Of the written publications devoted to the
Macintosh over the years, only one has always been regarded as
the source for all things Macintosh. That, of course, is
Macworld magazine.

In a new
series on Welcome to Macintosh called "A Talk with Macworld", I'll
be interviewing most of the Macworld editorial staff. And what
better way to start out than with the VP and Editorial Director,
Jason Snell:

Tommy: What drew you to Apple and the Mac?

Jason: I actually got an Apple IIe when I was in high
school, so I've been an Apple user since 1984. When I was a
sophomore in college I started working at my college newspaper,
which had just transitioned from physical paste-up to a system
where we wrote in Word and designed the paper in PageMaker. We were
using a bunch of Mac SEs (with
Radius full-page displays) and fought over the one Mac IIcx with the two-page display.

Macworld in 1986, 1991, 1997, and 2007

Anyway, I found myself coming in and using the Macs in the
office more and more, to the point that I basically didn't use my
Apple II. So in the spring of 1990, I went to the university
bookstore and bought my own Mac SE, and that was it. I've been a
Mac user ever since.

Tommy: Many people equate words such as eloquent,
seductive, even wow, to describe Apple and their products. How
would you describe them?

Jason: Apple is a company devoted to using high
technology to build products for regular people to use, to solve
the problems of regular nontechnical people living their regular
lives. That would seem to be simple and obvious, but very few
companies do this. Most tech companies are driven by what
technologies exist, not by how the lives of regular people could be
improved or made easier via the technology.

Apple has a fervor, a belief that a good
product should be a pleasure to use.

The end result is that most technology products are complicated
and lousy. People use them, sure, but only reluctantly. Apple has a
fervor, a belief that a good product should be a pleasure to use.
It goes a long way toward explaining why the users of Apple's
products feel an emotional attachment to them, while the users of
many lesser tech products feel an animosity or, at best, a
begrudging acceptance.

Tommy: Each person working at Macworld has a story
to tell of how they found themselves there. What lured you?

Jason: I started as an editorial intern at
MacUser, back in the day. I was a big Mac fan and was the
teaching assistant in grad school for a MacUser editor. I
convinced her to let me be a summer intern, they hired me on a few
months later, and the rest is history. I came over to
Macworld in 1997 as a part of MacUser-Macworld
merger.

Tommy: One can only imagine how cool it is to work for
Macworld. What's the best part of your job?

It's a huge amount of fun to be able to try
this stuff out for a living.

Jason: Tough question. So many things to choose from, but
overall I'd just say that we get to play in the toy store. We are
paid to spend our time trying out the latest new technology from
Apple and other tech companies. This is something that many Mac
users - including many of us, let's face it - would probably do on
our own anyway. It's a huge amount of fun to be able to try this
stuff out for a living.

Tommy: What's the worst part of working for
Macworld?

Jason: It's a lot of hard work. We're a relatively small
staff, and we're putting out a monthly magazine, posting something
like 15 stories per day to Macworld.com, running several other
websites, publishing e-Books . . . we all work pretty
hard.

Tommy: What does Macworld bring to the table in
the modern Mac age when compared to other publications?

Jason: In terms of the competition, I guess what we bring
to the table is the largest group of editors and writers devoted to
covering Apple and the Mac anywhere on the planet. The result is
the leading Mac magazine in the US and a website that covers the
Mac more broadly (news, reviews, opinion, podcasts and videos,
feature stories, message boards) than any single other Mac
website.

Tommy: Your opinion of Microsoft: How do you feel about
them, past and present?

Jason: I have great respect for the people at Microsoft's
Mac Business Unit. I have used Microsoft Word almost every day
since the fall of 1989. (Although to be fair, I write almost
everything in BBEdit these days.) Their Mac products are good,
especially considering that it's very hard to make any radical
changes to a product with that much of an installed base.

As for Microsoft in general, my feelings are much more
ambivalent. I don't think, in general, it does a very good job with
its products. It has all the money in the world, yet Apple's
operating system development team has run rings around it. With
Zune, I thought we might finally see Microsoft figure out how to
give Apple a run for its money, but the Zune has been nothing but a
reinforcement of the general opinion of Microsoft: Their products
come later and aren't as good.

...Microsoft as a company has completely lost
its way.

Frankly, the travesty of the Longhorn/Vista launch - the fact
that it became so delayed and lost so many of its "core" features
before it even shipped - convinces me that Microsoft as a company
has completely lost its way. At this point if I had to predict, I'd
say that Microsoft will still be in business 20 years from now
(sheerly from the volume of PCs who use Windows and Office), but
over time it will wane in importance. And in 2020 or 2025 we'll be
amazed that Microsoft used to be so big and important, sort of like
IBM or Digital.

I will say this: Microsoft was really smart to buy Bungie
Studios. I bought an XBox (and will probably buy an XBox 360)
because of the Halo series. And all those years inside the beast
hasn't diminished the quality of the work Bungie does, bless
'em.

Tommy: Has Windows improved and become more innovative
over the years or not so much? Your thoughts?

Jason: Better, absolutely. More innovative, sure. I do
feel that Microsoft is actually trying to innovate now. They see
themselves as innovators. I think they're generally wrong, but I do
believe they see themselves that way.

Tommy: What's the greatest thing about Apple
nowadays?

Jason: They're taking everything that made the Mac such a
great product - the design philosophy and even some of the
technology - and going full-bore into consumer electronics. The
iPod was the first example, but there's more to come. The iPod's
success shows that Apple's approach really can be a success when it
comes to CE.

Tommy: What do you see as the future of the Mac, the
future of Apple as a company?

Jason: Apple's going to expand its offerings, bringing
high-tech products with innovative physical designs and
user-interfaces to regular people, in ways that regular people will
actually appreciate.

Tommy: What are your favorite commercial, shareware, and
freeware apps for OS X?

Jason: I think there will still be standalone iPods, but
they'll look more like the iPhone. The iPhone design will probably
influence numerous similar products, the most obvious one being a
hard-drive-based, video-playing, touchscreen-style iPod. It's only
a matter of when.

The future of the shuffle is interesting. I think at some point
the shuffle's going to become embedded in a pair of Apple
earbuds.

Tommy: Do you agree with some columnist's opinions on
Apple becoming, in effect, this generation's Sony? Is there a
parallel?

Jason: I've touched on this already, but to restate: I
think Apple has always been about bringing high tech stuff to
regular people in the real world. The whole "Computer for the Rest
of Us" philosophy - it's still what drives Apple. It's in Apple's
DNA. And it turns out that the perfect place for Apple to exercise
that philosophy is in the consumer electronics market.

So there's some Sony parallel, but it's not a direct
parallel.

Tommy: Will Apple dominate the living room?

Jason: Will Apple be a player in the living room? Yes,
But domination is such a strong word. And the realities of cable
and satellite companies, and their control over their set-top
boxes, will make it impossible for Apple to be dominant in the next
five years.

Tommy: Will the iPhone do for the cell phone industry
what the iPod has done for the MP3 player industry?

Jason: Well, that depends on what you think the iPod has
done for the music player industry. The iPod came into a weak
market populated by lousy products nobody wanted, and turned it
into a huge category that it dominates.

The phone market is different. It's not a weak market. And I
don't think the iPhone is going to have iPod levels of market
share. But I do think that the iPhone will have a transformative
effect on the phone market, in the sense that it will force the
makers of other phones to really rethink what they're doing with
their products. I'm sure there are some more consumer-focused
interface designers and hardware designers at Nokia that are very
excited about the iPhone, because the iPhone's presence will give
them more to innovate in response.

Tommy: What would you like to see Apple do differently,
if anything?

Jason: They should tell me about the products they're
going to announce in advance - under NDA, of course - so that I can
have more time to think about them and write about them before the
announcements are made. That would sure be swell.

Tommy: What do you want those who read this article to
know about Macworld they may not already know?

Jason: We all use Macs and love Macs, most of us for more
than a decade. And that we're a pretty friendly, casual workplace -
sometimes I think people believe we're wearing silver jumpsuits and
working in mahogany-covered offices in high-rise buildings
somewhere. Or that we're all Silicon Valley people who hang out
next to the Apple campus and tool around in our Porsches. The fact
is, we're on the fifth floor of an office building in San
Francisco, fairly close to the ballpark. Most of us are in our 30s.
And very, very few of us drive luxury cars or wear silver
jumpsuits.

Tommy: Will the Mac's market share grow looking down the
road?

Jason: Yes. Maybe not to massive proportions, but I do
believe that the Mac will continue to grow in popularity, now that
it can claim Windows compatibility as well.

Tommy: Your thoughts on Linux and the open source
movement? Will it help or hurt Apple?

Jason: It's already helped Apple massively. Mac OS X
would not be possible were it not for the open source movement,
because so much of OS X is based on open source. To its
credit, Apple has gotten very good at taking advantage of open
source software to improve its products. Microsoft hasn't, largely
because its management knows that locking people into its
proprietary systems is the best way to keep those customers from
abandoning Microsoft's products.

Tommy: What kind of Mac horsepower gets put to use in the
offices of Macworld?

Jason: Well, we buy at least one of everything so we can
test it. We generally stay pretty current. A bunch of editors got
Mac Pros a couple months back.
Most of us are using laptops these days, though - a bunch of
MacBook Pros and MacBooks.
I've got a dual 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook (in black) as my main
system these days.

It's great to have the latest(ish) hardware, but it's also
necessary for us. It'd be hard to write about Intel Macs if we were
still using PowerPC Macs! Same for software. We'll upgrade to
Leopard immediately, because there's no other way for us to write
about Leopard. We've got to use it.

Tommy: Each of you no doubt has a Mac you use at home
and/or on the road. What's yours?

Jason: So my work system, which I also take home every
night, is the aforementioned top-of-the-line Core 2 Duo MacBook.
I've also got a dual 2 GHz Power Mac G5 at home.

Tommy: What's the funniest thing that's happened to you
in your time at Macworld?

Jason: I don't know if this counts as funny, but once in
a press conference I asked Steve Jobs if AppleScript would make it
into OS X. His response was, "Of course," which was frankly
news to me. And I heard rumblings later that it was actually news
to some of the other people who were working on AppleScript at
Apple. I had no idea that so many people were waiting for the
answer to that question! ;-)

Tommy: The future of Macworld - how do you see it
evolving?

Jason: More on the Web. More multimedia, audio and video.
Modifying the magazine over time to reflect the changes in how
people will use a print magazine in a Web-connected era. Getting
everyone to stop referring to Macworld as a magazine and start
thinking of it as the trifecta: website, magazine, and trade
show.

Tommy: Thanks, Jason!

Stay tuned for the next installment when I interview Peter
Cohen, senior editor and Game Room columnist.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to drop me a line at thomas
(at) lowendmac (dot) com.

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Welcome Image and Text

We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.